Russian Airliner Crashes On Landing In Siberia
Russian airliner crashes on landing in Siberia
Plane with 200 aboard bursts into flames in Irkutsk, most feared killed
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13773633/
7/8/2006
MOSCOW - An airplane carrying about 200 people crashed Sunday in the Siberian city of Irkutsk and most on board were feared dead, officials said.
The regional prosecutor’s office said a preliminary count showed that more than 150 people died, the Interfax news agency reported.
The plane was carrying 192 passengers, Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Irina Andrianova said.
Andrianova said 43 people had been hospitalized and another 10 managed to escape.
The Interfax report said that the dead were believed to include the eight crew members.
The Airbus A-310 operated by Sibir, Russia’s second-largest airline, crashed on landing, went off the runway and burst into flames, Andrianova said.
“The aircraft veered off the runway on landing. It was traveling at a terrific speed,” Andrianova said.
The plane hit a concrete barrier, collapsing the front section of the aircraft, she said. It then burst into flames.
The aircraft was on a flight from Moscow to Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal.
It took five emergency services more than two hours to extinguish the flames, Andrianova said.
Former Soviet airlines had a grisly record of crashes in the 1990s, following the whittling of much of Soviet monopoly carrier Aeroflot into hundreds of regional airlines plagued by scant money, aging equipment and cavalier disregard for safety.
In recent years, crashes from equipment failure or pilot error have declined sharply.
Sibir came under new ownership amid a 1998 financial crisis and installed a dynamic young team to reinvent what remained of Aeroflot’s Siberian wing with the help of Western consultants.
Those plans were dealt a blow when a Sibir Tu-154 was one of two planes lost in near-simultaneous crashes blamed on terrorist bombs in 2004.
Three years earlier, another Sibir plane was shot down by a stray Ukrainian missile fired during military exercises. All 78 people on board died.
